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Fajita Pizza, and let’s talk tomatoes

Have I mentioned? I’m a freak for tomatoes. For a lot of reasons. I’m not a person who is generally drawn to healthy food, but I think I could eat tomatoes every day forever.

The biggest reason probably, is that when I think of tomatoes I think of summer as a kid. I don’t know about you, but when I was really young, summer lasted forever. It seemed endless. My mom worked part time at various places–the video store or walmart–but when she was home we spent the summer outside. She’d pull a lounge chair out into the yard and set the sprinkler up and I’d play for hours, or we’d go to the community pool and she would read a magazine while I swam. When we weren’t doing that, we gardened. We didn’t have a huge garden but always tomatoes, peppers, beans/peas, and sometimes carrots or radishes or zuccinni. Every day I’d go out to see how many tomatoes had ripened and I’d fill them up into the bottom of my shirt. We’d eat them straight from the garden still warm from the sun.

I was soo excited when I planted my garden this year and actually started to grow! I started getting a tomato here and there a few weeks ago, but they’re really starting to come in now. Here is yesterday’s loot:

Today after work I ate a tomato plain. Then a blt for dinner and a tomato/mozzeralla/basil salad. Tomorrow I will continue with the tomato madness!
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In mostly unrelated news, I made fajita pizza last night! This is really not a hard recipe at all, but it’s maybe something you haven’t thought of so I’ll give you the steps anyways. One of my favorite things to do is to take some random type of meal and make it into a pizza because it’s just hard to screw up. So let’s get started.

First, cook some chicken. My favorite way to cook chicken for a lot of meals is to boil it. It’s the easiest way to cook chicken that is still frozen (I never remember to thaw), it’s impossible to burn, and it’s fast. I put the chicken in a deep pan that about half full of water and turn the heat to high. By the time the water boils, give the chicken about 2 more minutes and it should be done.

This was six frozen chicken tenders. I don’t know how much that is… maybe 2 breasts? Just under a pound? Totally a guess. While the chicken is heating up, chop half a yellow onion. Chop it courser than you would for other recipes, because you want to get bigger bites of onion like you would if you were eating a regular fajita.

Then cut 1 pepper into large chunks. I prefer red/yellow/orange peppers to green, but any would be fine. You may notice some frost on these peppers. Because non-green peppers are so expensive (usually 3.99/pound versus 1.99/pound for green), I wait until they go on sale and then I buy a whole bunch, slice them, and freeze them. I love doing that because I’ll go in and just use a few slices at a time if I want just a little chopped pepper for a quesadilla or something.

Right about now your chicken should be done, so take it out of the water and throw it on a cutting board. Dump the water out and put back on the burner. You don’t have to thaw the peppers before cooking them. Just spray the pan with some cooking spray and dump both them and the onions in.

While the peppers and onions are getting friendly, cut your chicken into small pieces.

The peppers and onions should be looking pretty good now. You like to get them mostly soft with a few brown marks.

It is probably time to turn the oven on to 450. Dump these out into a bowl, give the pan another spray of cooking oil (notice how everything goes in one pan? I don’t like dishes!), and toss the chopped chicken back in. Add 1/2 tspn chili powder, 1/2 tspn cumin, 1/4 tspn garlic, and a few shakes of red pepper flakes. Don’t be scared of the brown bottom of the pan. It’s just fine, I promise.

Toss the chicken with the spices just enough to brown it a little and get it coated and pretty.

Last step before assembly, grate some cheese. Now, if you want to use a bag of mexican blend cheese, I won’t judge you. But, I will tell you that grating a block of montery jack cheese is way, way better. I’m just sayin’.

Now its finally time to assemble the pizza! You can make your own crust if you want to but the store-bought is better I think. I always go for the thin crust because it has less calories and it’s also a bit crispier, which I like. This is a Mama Mary’s Brick Oven Style pizza crust. Add the chicken, then the peppers and onions.

Then cheese, and (if you’re a tomato freak like me) a sliced tomato.

Put it into the oven for 10-12 minutes, and turn the oven down to 425. When it comes out, it’ll look like this.

And that’s it! I cut this into 9 slices. Each slice has about 230 calories and 9.5 grams of fat. Two pieces is filling for dinner, I think. If you wanted to cut down on the fat, you could easily use reduced fat cheese or just reduce the amount of cheese on the pizza. But, I always make dinner my biggest meal so 460 calories and 19 grams of fat is okay by me. (If you halved the amount of cheese on the pizza, each slice would have about 175 calories and 3 grams of fat).